Factotum

The late Charles Bukowski has become something of a cinematic cottage industry recently, inspiring a raft of documentaries about his life and work. Like Barbet Schroeder's 1987 Barfly, Bent Hamer's Factotum is a dramatization of the writer's semiautobiographical accounts of his hazy, lazy early days, which is to say it's not your typical action-packed Hollywood flick. As its title implies, the film depicts Bukowski's fictional alter-ego Henry Chinaski (Matt Dillon) making his way through a succession of short-term jobs separated by long-term intervals of binge drinking and sex (as well as one winning streak at the racetrack), but plot-wise, nothing much really happens and Chinaski remains at the end what he was at the beginning—an alcoholic consumed by the drive to be a writer, a man not so much defiant as simply oblivious to social expectations. What keeps Factotum from dissolving into tedium is an offhandedly amusing script, a coolly minimalist style, and a perfectly calibrated lead performance by Dillon, who submerges his leading-man image into the shambling figure of a perpetually lethargic boozer whose grizzled appearance will make you forget the boyishly handsome face under the beard. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include a 28-minute “making-of” featurette, a soundtrack spot, and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for a solid portrait of the dysfunctional artist.] (F. Swietek)